Menu

Post navigation

Why Notepad++

Now not many of you readers have had the misfortune of having made my acquaintance. Those of you that have, will unhesitatingly certify my selfish, petty, arrogant and miserly nature. It is with great difficulty that one stumbles past these character flaws to meet that alleged nice guy which my wife insists exists. Another minor character flaw afflicting me is this strong desire to write and a stronger desire for what I have written to be read, preferably by a sample of set of people not entirely comprised by just my poor wife. To quench this double desire, I started a blog a few months ago.

I wrote exactly one post, and then no more. I couldn’t cope with the delirious possibility of being able to publish to potentially the whole world at the click of single button. Heaven forbid someone else has exactly the same ideas as I and posts them more articulately a few milliseconds before me. Perhaps I am suffering from the Facebook-Twitter syndrome. In any case, the antidote to my irrational anxiety is to take the writing offline. I guess I am good at writing at my own sweet pace. The irrational me is convinced that this is the only way, no one else will have the exact same idea at the exact same time as I do. I will leave the psychoanalysis to my Freudian readers.

What is the big deal about writing offline you may ask? There are but a few options – Microsoft Word, Openoffice Writer, or Notepad/Wordpad to name a few.

Between Microsoft office and Openoffice Writer I would rather choose Microsoft Office because it is slick and intuitive and so much more aesthetically pleasing to use. However, as a card-carrying member of misers anonymous it pains me many times over that I must pay $190 or its equivalent to have the pleasure of writing in Microsoft Word. Sorry, not willing to do that.

Notepad is not really a bad alternative, except, I am not really good at spellings. I so desperately dependent on Microsoft Word’s spell-check that I am known to whine about not having spell-check while doodling in my paper notebook during meetings at work. At work I do use a geeky and powerful text editor called notepad++. Entirely free, quite slick, and doesn’t need much resources.

It never crossed my mind that notepad++ could be the medicine to cure my irrationality, until I was editing this xml file the other day and I noticed this red line underneath a word I had just typed in. The spell-check! And it does not cost me a penny! Yay! Now I could write at my own pace to my heart’s content in peace, with a very light weight but at the same time very flexible and powerful text editor.

If I were Good Guy Greg, then I would be donating some to the creators of notepad++, but…